An anonymous reader writes: As many of you know, part of my popularity analysis of GNU/Linux distributions includes search engine results. One thing I immediately noticed when I started analyzing the data was how fewer results Bing has compared to Google specifically for the term "Ubuntu Linux". At first, I thought that perhaps Bing simply hasn't indexed as much as Google and it will catch up. But over several ranking periods now, Bing is still, in my opinion, unusually low in "Ubuntu Linux" results. So I did a quick and dirty experiment:

colinneagle writes: Yesterday, we saw the release of GNOME 3.8, which comes with its impressive "Classic Mode" feature. Classic Mode, in a nutshell, brings back a significant portion of the GNOME 2 user interface. The one that so many people (still) love and cling to. The one that Ubuntu utilized as its default user experience – before switching over to the in-house developed Unity Desktop. In fact, GNOME 2 remains so beloved by so many that some have gone to the (fairly desperate seeming, in my opinion) measure of forking GNOME 3 with the intention of modifying it to provide a more "GNOME 2" style experience for their users. This includes the Linux Mint team with their Cinnamon environment.

These forks of GNOME 3 have confused me right from the start. You see...GNOME 3 is designed to be highly customizable. Building a GNOME 2-styled user experience (the top and bottom panels, the Application menu, etc.) on top of GNOME 3, utilizing extensions, has been done since almost the very moment that GNOME 3 first launched back in early 2011.

The talented developers that forked GNOME 3, for this purpose, (such as the Cinnamon crew) have just wasted a significant portion of their time. That time could have been spent working with the GNOME team to add new functionality and improvements. And that loss of time and progress is a major bummer.

jrepin writes: "Key findings from this year’s report show the world’s largest enterprises are increasing their investments in Linux for the third consecutive year. Industry reports for the most recent quarter (4Q12) show that while overall server revenue is only growing at 3.1 percent year-over-year; Linux experienced 12.7 percent year-over-year growth for the quarter while Windows only increased 3.2 percent and UNIX was down 24.1 percent. The Enterprise End User Report helps to inform the industry about what is driving this adoption and how market growth is shaping up for the future."

An anonymous reader writes: The E17 Enlightenment project has released a new version of its Terminology terminal emulator. With Terminology 0.3 comes several fancy features, including the ability to preview video files, images, and PDF files from within the terminal. There's new escape sequences, inline video playback, and other features to this terminal emulator that's only built on EFL and libc.

kthreadd writes: Version 3.8 of the GTK+ GUI framework has been released in version 3.8. A new feature in GTK+ 3.8 is support for Wayland 1.0, the display server that will replace X on free desktops. Among the other new featurs are improved support for themeing, fixes to the geometry management and improved accessibility. There is also better support for touch, as part of a long going effort in making GTK+ touch-aware.

Sodki writes: The Linux Game Tome, one of the most important websites related to video gaming in GNU/Linux, will shut down on the 13th of April, according to a news post published on the website. The decision was made due to the "lack both the time and the ambition to do what is necessary to keep the site afloat", which has resulted in "spam clogging the forums, lack of updates and increasing brokenness of the site". This might not be the end, though. The maintainers of The Linux Game Tome will make available a dump of the games database, so that anyone interested can cook up a new and updated version of the website, and a worthwhile effort will be considered for a transfer of ownership of the domain. The current source code of the website, which is from 1999, will not be available because "it is not fit for human consumption".

jrepin writes: "On day two of the 2013 Embedded Linux Conference, Robert Rose of SpaceX spoke about the "Lessons Learned Developing Software for Space Vehicles". In his talk, he discussed how SpaceX develops its Linux-based software for a wide variety of tasks needed to put spacecraft into orbit—and eventually beyond. Linux runs everywhere at SpaceX, he said, on everything from desktops to spacecraft."

hypnosec writes: UEFI guru Matthew Garrett who cleared the Linux kernel in Samsung laptop bricking issues has come to rescue beleaguered users by offering a survival guide enabling them to avoid similar issues in the future. According to Garrett, storage space constraints in UEFI storage variables is the reason Samsung laptops end up bricking themselves. Garrett said that if the storage space utilized by the UEFI firmware is more than 50 per cent full the laptop will refuse to start and end up being bricked. To prevent this from happening he has provided a Kernel patch that would ensure that Linux does not fill up more than 50 per cent of UEFI firmware's storage space.

Gerardo Zamudio writes: "The big news here is the removal of MySQL in favor of MariaDB. This shouldn't really be a surprise on any level. The poll on LQ showed a large majority of our users were in favor of the change. It's my belief that the MariaDB Foundation will do a better job with the code, be more responsive to security concerns, and be more willing to work with the open source community. And while I don't think there is currently any issue with MySQL's licensing of the community edition for commercial uses, several threads on LQ showed that there is confusion about this, whereas with MariaDB the freedom to use the software is quite clear. Thanks are due to Heinz Wiesinger for his work on transitioning the build script, testing, and getting us all behind this move. He's been working with MariaDB (and their developers) for several years now. Vincent Batts also had a hand in the early discussions here — he met Daniel Bartholomew of MariaDB on a train last year and got a copy of the source to play with to pass the time on the journey (ah, the miracle of thumbdrives:), and was impressed with not only MariaDB itself, but also with the welcome that Slackware was getting. We expect they'll be responsive to any concerns we have. In the vast majority of situations, MariaDB is entirely compatible with existing MySQL databases and will drop right in with no changes required. There's an article available outlining the areas in which MariaDB differs from MySQL that I'd recommend reading:https://kb.askmonty.org/v/mariadb-versus-mysql-compatibility/Thanks to the MariaDB Foundation! We look forward to working with you.

An anonymous reader writes: I'm a very new user to Linux looking for a distro that allows me to control and customize, but I'm not sure where to start. I had a friend install Ubuntu 12.04 on my computer, with the E17 window manager and somehow I managed to crash it during the copying of some non-important files and now my computer won't boot (the hardware's fine though). I've found descriptions of Arch Linux to be spot on to what I'm looking for and want (/. user serviscope_minor mentioned Arch a couple weeks ago and it caught my attention), but my experience in the terminal is literally about an hour.That said, I really want to learn more, don't mind hard work, enjoy challenges, and am perfectly willing to spend hours and hours for months on end to learn command line.I grew up in Windows, and these days use a notebook running an old version of Ubuntu with GNOME exclusively--I'm comfortable in the GUI of Linux systems, but that doesn't translate into any kind of behind-the-scenes ability...Any suggestions, projects to start with, books to read, or tutorials to do to try would be appreciated.

Olivier Bonaventure writes: The TCP protocol is closely coupled with the underlying IP protocol.Once a TCP connection has been established through one IP address,the other packets of the connection must be sent from this address. Thismakes mobility and load balancing difficult. Multipath TCP isa new extension that solves these old problems by decoupling TCP fromthe underlying IP. A Multipath TCP connection can send packets overseveral interfaces/addresses simultaneously while remaining backwardcompatible with existing TCP applications. Multipath TCP has several usecases including smartphones that can use both WiFi and 3G or serversthat can pool multiple high-speed interfaces. Christoph Paasch, GregoryDetal and their colleagues who develop the implementation ofMultipath TCP in the Linux kernel have achieved 50 Gbps for a single TCPconnection by pooling together six 10 Gbps interfaces. See here fortechnical details and full source code.

GovCheese writes: Canonical, the software company that manages and funds Ubuntu, announced that the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology will base their national reference architecture for standard operating systems on Ubuntu, and they will call it Kylin. Arguably China is the largest desktop market and the announcement has important implications. Shuttleworth's phrasing of, “The release of Ubuntu Kylin brings the Chinese open source community into the global Ubuntu community,” will irk many who already feel Shuttleworth controversial, but the partnership further cements Ubuntu as an open-source influencer. This is a win for Ubuntu. Is it a win for the open-source community?

psykocrime writes: "The crazy kids at Fogbeam Labs have started a discussion about Google and their relationship with the Open Web, and questioning who will step up to defend these principles, even as Google seem to be abdicating their position as such a champion. Some candidates mentioned include Yahoo, IBM, Red Hat, Mozilla, Microsoft and The Wikimedia Foundation, among others. The question is, what organization(s) have BOTH the necessary clout and the required ethical principles, to truly champion the Open Web, in the face of commercial efforts which are clearly inimical to Open Source, Open Standards, Libre Culture and other elements of an Open Web?"

jrepin writes: "KDE is proud to announce the first release (1.0.0) of Plasma Media Center. Built on Plasma and KDE technologies. Designed to offer a rich experience to media enthusiasts. KDE's Plasma Media Center (PMC) is aimed towards a unified media experience on PCs, Tablets, Netbooks, TVs and other devices. Plasma Media Center can be used to view images, play music or watch videos. Media files can be on the local filesystem or accessed with KDE’s Desktop Search."

Freshly Exhumed writes: Sean Michael Kerner has revealed an inconvenient truth: earlier this month, 'Google Chrome running Chrome OS was hailed as being a survivor in the Pwnium/Pwn2own event that hacked IE, Firefox and Chrome browsers on Windows. Apple's Safari running on Mac OS X was not hacked and neither (apparently) was Chrome on Chrome OS. Google disclosed this morning that Chrome on Chrome OS had in fact been exploited — albeit, unreliably. The same researcher that took Google's money last year for exploiting Chrome, known publicly only as 'PinkiePie' was awarded $40,000 for exploiting Chrome/Chrome OS via a Linux kernel bug, config file error and a video parsing flaw.' So, was it really Google Chrome, or was Linux to blame?

jrepin writes: "While moving its codebase to Qt5, the KDE Development Platform is undergoing a number of changes that lead to a more modular codebase (called KDE Framework 5) on top of a hardware-accelerated graphics stack. In this post, you’ll learn a bit about the status of Frameworks 5 and porting especially Plasma — that will be known as Plasma Workspaces 2, paying credit to its more convergent architecture."

From the deepest darkest corner of the deepest darkest dungeon of Bizarro World, Brian Lunduke releases Linux Tycoon, his closed-source game about an open source operating system for a closed source operating system no one uses. That’s right, you thought today’s earlier headlines were a pump-fake-pass for April Fool’s Day, but this takes things one step further. Linux Tycoon, the “premier Linux Distro Building Simulator game in the universe”, is now available for DOS.

jrepin writes: "After nearly 9 years of seeding The Pirate Bay’s oldest working torrent is still very much alive. Interestingly, the torrent is not a Hollywood classic nor is it an evergreen music album. The honor goes to a pirated copy of “Revolution OS”, a documentary covering the history of Linux, GNU and the free software movement."

An anonymous reader writes: The team at Pwnie Express seems to have a lot of trouble standing still, as it doesn’t seem more than a few months go by before they are talking about yet another disruptive open source product that they are about to unleash on the security community.

First it was their Pwn Plug, which combined an off the shelf SheevaPlug with a feature packed open source firmware that turned it into an incredibly capable security tool. Then came the absolutely diabolical Power Pwn, which hid the same type of functionality into what looked like a standard power strip.

Today they’ve launched their latest product, continuing along the same line of hiding cutting edge open source security tools in plain sight: the Pwn Pad.

hweimer writes: I manage a small network which includes some clients that are regularly deployed in locations where there is no or only poor internet access. Currently, local copies of data for these clients are created and merged back more or less manually, which naturally creates all sorts of problems. So I'm looking now for a distributed file system so that each client has always access to a local copy, which is automatically re-synced once it comes back online. Storage space is not critical, nor is obscene read/write performance. An additional requirement is that it has to be included in Debian, at least in the upcoming "wheezy" release. Any recommendations?